I've got program_options working for a program that has a configuration file. Aside for some program options, the file contains one or more aliases that the user defines for a server/port value, and we don't know what the alias might be until they run the program; then we search for the alias and use its value. I seems like the collect_unrecognized function would be convenient for us, but I can't seem to make it work. I passed it the parsed_options.options member, and I can see the values in there, with the string_key set correctly, and the value set correctly, and the unregistered flag set to true. But the string array result is empty. My code looks something like this: parsed_options parsed = parse_config_file(ifs, options_desc, true); vector<string> unregistered = collect_unrecognized(parsed.options, exclude_positional); What would really be convenient would be a flag to allow the unrecognized entries to be added to the map, so then, when the user enters the alias, I could just retrieve that entry from the map. Should this work for a config file? If so, what might I be doing wrong? And if not, any suggestions for how I might get it to work, aside from just parsing the file again? Thanks for your help, -- Marty Fried Senior software engineer Aldon http://www.aldon.com